If you were a school psychologist at the King’s Dominion Atelier of the Deadly Arts, you would definitely be stuffing benzodiazepines into your own mouth by the handful. Rick Remender and Wes Craig’s Deadly Class seems perfect for apprentice assassins at first glance, but in reality, it wouldn’t work.
A high school for the children of criminals? Where students trained for killing roam armed?! Come on!
You’ve probably heard of the dramaturgical principle that if a loaded gun appears on stage, sooner or later it will be fired. Well, for those attending the assassin class, firing the gun – with classmates in the crosshairs – is part of the prescribed curriculum.
The King’s Dominion Atelier of the Deadly Arts is essentially a psychopath training ground, which would only work until the first freshly graduated seniors returned home to mommy and daddy. However, instead of a resourceful karate champion, ninja, or commando, the parents could welcome home unpredictable wrecks devoid of any human emotions. Afterward, dissatisfied ancestors from all over the world would flock to San Francisco to demand a refund of tuition… and incidentally, to chop the entire teaching staff into tiny pieces.
Rick Remender, the master of the most unbelievable twists, organizes a class trip to Mexico in the seventh part of the Deadly Class. And you, the reader, are supposed to believe that Marcus, one of the most repulsive protagonists in comic literature, successfully takes on a group of Yakuza. Man, he got expelled! Not to mention that he only attended for a year, most of which he was totally high on drugs!
So, do you believe it? Okay then.
If it’s been a relatively long time since you read the previous part, you’re in luck because you might not remember exactly why you hate the characters in the book. (Just know that you hate them.) Perhaps this is one reason why you don’t find the seventh part of the Deadly Class as annoying as the previous ones. But it could also be because of the continuous action.
Fortunately, the blood-soaked, ninja-like action is precisely interrupted by the more lyrical parts. These, almost without exception, work now. There is death, a turning point, truly profound twists, but even in their extremeness, they stay grounded in reality.
If you were to start acquainting yourself with Rick Remender and Wes Craig’s series with this part, you actually wouldn’t find much to criticize.
And when Saya takes center stage, the character who hasn’t made a complete fool of herself in the series so far, you’ve reached the climax of “Love like blood,” but for real the whole series. The power combined with a sense of inferiority is capable of astonishing things – and, of course, paves the way for a very pleasant future revenge.
But the best is saved for last: Master Lin, who resembles a small, acholic*, sausage-shaped piece of poop, remarkably does not appear in the panels of this comic!
7.5/10 (75%)
Deadly Class – Vol. 7: Love Like Blood by Rick Remender (writer) · Wes Craig (illustrator)
120 pages, Paperback
Published in 2018 by Image Comics
acholic* referring to a pathological lack of bile, characterized by a white color